On Yes and No, Part 1: Owning Our Yes and No

 

Yes and no are among the first words a child learns, and among the last many of us master.

When our son was about a 9 months old, we frequently had our eight-year-old nephew over. One day, we discovered that our nephew had been encouraging our son’s “no.” Our toddler was now shaking his head emphatically and saying no to nearly every question. Our nephew found his enthusiasm hilarious.

Funny as it was, our son was doing important work. A toddler’s no declares that he exists, a person separate from the people around him. The teenager’s no comes next. We parents want our child to have a healthy no for those things we see as risks and dangers. The teenager no has strength before it has reasons, so it can turn against parents and convention. The mature adult’s yes and no are meant to be something different again: freely chosen, with reasons behind them. Many of us never quite arrive.

In more than forty years of sitting with people, I have come to believe something simple: if you don’t have a no, your yes means less. A yes that could never have been a no is not really a choice. It may be a reflex wearing the clothes of agreement or generosity.

Jesus put it plainly: “Let your yes mean yes, and your no mean no” (Matthew 5:37). He assumed we would have both words available. Many of the people I see struggle to use them freely.

Free Will and Agency

Two ideas are worth separating. Free will is the capacity to choose: to weigh, to desire, and to decide. Agency is the capacity to act on that choice and influence what happens. A prisoner may freely choose, yet have little agency. A busy executive may have enormous agency, yet act mostly from habit and fear. One has the freedom of mind but is locked in a cage; the other has the keys to the world but is locked in a routine.

Philosophers have argued about free will for centuries. Their positions differ on whether our choices can genuinely originate with us or are ultimately determined by prior causes. I am not going to settle that debate here. But I will say this from the counseling chair: people experience differing degrees of freedom. Some choices feel like mine. Others feel as though they happened to me before I knew I was choosing. The people-pleaser’s yes is often the second kind.

The Yes That Comes Before the Choosing

We are familiar with three commonly described survival responses to threat: fight, flight, and freeze. Therapist Pete Walker popularized a fourth term, fawn, to describe survival through appeasement. If I can keep the threatening person pleased with me, perhaps I will be safe.

For a child in a home with an angry, unpredictable, or overwhelmed parent, keeping the peace may be an effective adaptation. Keep everyone happy, anticipate needs, and never cause trouble. That child is not weak or defective. The child is using the capacities available to maintain connection and protect against danger.

Over time, appeasement can become habitual. Decades later, a coworker’s frown or a spouse’s sigh may trigger the same impulse to please before we have time to consider whether it is needed. That is why so many people-pleasers say, “I don’t know why I agreed to that.” The choice was theirs, but it may not have been as free or deliberate as it appeared.

The underlying capacities are good. Our need for connection is good, and so is our ability to recognize and respond to others’ needs. The goal is not to eliminate our capacity to accommodate others. It is to restore our ability to choose when accommodation is appropriate and when a different response is needed.

Choosing Toward Health

William Glasser’s Choice Theory offers a helpful picture. Glasser described all behavior as “total behavior”: acting, thinking, feeling, and physiology. We cannot simply choose not to feel the tight chest or the rush to please. But we can choose what we do and think next, and over time our feelings follow. Glasser believed we choose nearly all of our behavior. I would add that the impulse is not always chosen, but the response can be, and with practice, the point of choosing comes earlier.

Glasser also proposed five basic needs: survival, love and belonging, power, freedom, and fun. The people-pleaser is often meeting the need for love and belonging at the expense of freedom. In learning and development, we choose to build skills that meet our needs and move us toward health and happiness. When we give up choice, we tend to fall into disconnecting patterns, and health and happiness slip away. Owning our yes and no is one of those skills.

When the Helper Can’t Say No

I learned this lesson the hard way. In the year after the Columbine shootings, I was 37 and working with the Jefferson Center for Mental Health. I said yes to almost every opportunity to serve: fifty or more hours a week of sessions, Wednesdays at the school, support groups at church, and the parent who caught me at my son’s baseball game.

My employer asked if I would speak with The Rocky Mountain News when they requested someone to interview for the first-anniversary story they were preparing. I told them the tragedy was like a toxic waste spill, and all of us “helpers” had run in with our sponges. But sponges get full, I said; you have to wring them out to be any good for very long. I also admitted that driving nails—an allusion to my earlier work in construction—for a couple of weeks sounded pretty good. Reading that now, I hear a man whose yes was running out because he had not fully utilized his no.

The no came, eventually: to some hours, to some requests, and yes to prayer, exercise, and rest. That no is what kept my yes alive for the next twenty-five years.

I recently told a client that self-care is not selfish. Good self-care is what allows us to keep serving others well. The same is true of our yes and no. Good choices benefit not only the person making them, but everyone who draws on that person’s health and vibrancy.

Freedom That Is Real, Wounded, and Growing

The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that freedom is a real power, rooted in reason and will, to act or not to act, and so to shape our own lives (CCC 1731). We are not dominoes. But the Church is not naïve either. It recognizes that our responsibility can be diminished by ignorance, fear, habit, inordinate attachments, and other psychological or social factors (CCC 1735). Long before anyone used the word fawn, the Church recognized that fear and habit can impair our freedom.

The Catholic view is hopeful and honest at the same time. Our freedom is real, but it is wounded. And it can grow. “The more one does what is good,” the Catechism teaches, “the freer one becomes” (CCC 1733).

St. Paul shows what freedom is from and what it is for. In Romans 6, we are “freed from sin” (Romans 6:18), and freedom is not permission to remain where we were. In Galatians, we are “called for freedom,” to “serve one another through love” (Galatians 5:13).

Scripture also gives us pictures of mature freedom. Jesus withdrew when the crowd wanted to make Him king (John 6:15), and made time to pray while people were still waiting to be healed (Luke 5:16). Responding to every demand is not the same as fulfilling a mission. His yes in Gethsemane—“not my will but yours” (Luke 22:42)—was not mere compliance. It was a freely embraced obedience.

And consider Mary. At the Annunciation, she was “greatly troubled,” and she asked, “How can this be?” (Luke 1:29, 34). She did not suppress her question or offer an automatic agreement. She did not have every uncertainty resolved, but she was able to ask, to receive an answer, and then to consent. The most consequential yes in human history was spoken by a young woman who took the time to engage what she had been asked to do.

Freedom is not the absence of questions or uncertainty. It is the capacity to respond to them and still choose.

Where Choices Are Made

Owning our yes and no begins within us. It asks us to notice the reflex, understand where it came from, and choose anyway. And it isn’t just for us: a person who chooses toward health carries that health into every relationship.

But the moment of choosing is only part of the story. Next we will look underneath it, to the templates we built yesterday that make most of our choices today.